Lu Shao-chia follows his heart to music

Lu Shao-chia.

By June Tsai

Taiwan-born conductor Lu Shao-chia is a man of few words. When it comes to music, he said, he engages himself with the essence, which is beyond words.

“Much can be spoken ‘about’ a work of music, like the life of the composer, the background of his composition, and so on, but these don’t get you to the music itself,” Lu said in an interview with Taiwan Today June 10. “You may know nothing about a composer but still be moved by what you hear.”

During rehearsals, Lu said, “I don’t speak too much—just a few words such as ‘louder here,’ ‘too quick there’—absolutely prosaic and without a bit of fantasy. But details are very important to bring out the images or metaphysical feeling implied in music.”

The 50-year-old conductor began his career in Germany after graduating from Vienna’s Hochschule fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst in 1991. He was principal conductor at the Komische Opera Berlin from 1995 to 1998 and music director of the Staatorcheater Rheinische Philharmonie Koblenz between 1998 and 2004.

Lu served five seasons at the Staatsopera Hannover as music director from 2001 to 2006, becoming a celebrated younger generation conductor, invited to perform operas and orchestral works with many leading European groups. Since 2010, he has been music director for the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan.

The idea of becoming a career musician never occurred to him before he was 20, Lu said. Nor was that the intention of Lu’s parents, who had all of their five children receive piano lessons beginning when they were very young.

“It has all just come naturally,” Lu said. He began learning piano at five. At the time Taiwan was still under the rule of the martial law, and the society was relatively closed off from the international community. At home, however, Lu could appreciate Mozart and Beethoven thanks to his father, a country doctor in a Hakka town in northern Taiwan.

“My father adored Western culture, and he worked hard to create a musical environment for his children,” Lu said. “He told me how even before I was of school age I’d pick records out of his collection and ask him to play particular pieces.”

With all his experience making music for audiences around the world, Lu still remembers with gratitude his childhood full of music.

“My father did not plan for his children to become musicians, but for them to be able to appreciate music. And indeed, that period of pure enjoyment has helped me through the ups and downs of my career.”

As a teenager Lu showed talent on the piano but opted to go to a regular high school rather than undergo formal musical training. He then graduated from National Taiwan University with a degree in psychology.

“While in university I thought about giving up psychology and going for music because I really liked it, but I was wondering what I could do since it seemed a bit too late for me to become a professional pianist,” he recalled.

Felix Chen, a Taiwanese conductor and music director with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, first spotted Lu’s potential when he accompanied student musicians on piano, and suggested he learn conducting.

“I didn’t think I’d be a good conductor because I was an introvert and not verbal, but Chen said something that prompted me to try. He said it is with his hands that a conductor speaks.”

In 1985, Lu went to the U.S. to study conducting at Indiana University Bloomington. Looking for more practical experience, he left a year later to serve as an assistant conductor with TSO. In 1987, he headed for Europe, and soon began to win top prizes at conducting competitions—at France’s International Besancon Competition for Young Conductors, the Antonio Pedrotti International Conducting Competition in Italy and the Kondrashin Conductors’ Competition in Amsterdam.

In 1994, Lu was called back from Europe to sit in for world famous conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who had suddenly fallen ill before a concert in Taiwan with Anton Bruckner, Modest Mussorgsky and his Munich Philharmonic. Lu conducted the originally scheduled program with huge success, bringing him several future invitations to work with the orchestra.

To the delight of local music lovers, Lu returned to Taiwan in 2010 to head the NSO. The decision, he said, was without struggle. “I thought it was time to do something for my native land, offering good music to my people.”

As one who has approached Western music from a different culture, geographically distant from the center of classical music, Lu does not think background is a factor in understanding and interpreting the heart of music.

“Music speaks to everyone. You might need to learn something—the language, religion and history—to help you comprehend a work, but these are peripheral to the essence of music.”

He believes music knows no borders of any kind. “For non-Westerners, I believe we have less burden, and can even be more open-minded, in dealing with musical works by, say, French or German composers—it’s all just music to us.”

Local critic Chiao Yuan-pu relayed a story showing Lu’s sensitivity as a conductor, told to him by French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. During Bavouzet’s rehearsal with the NSO playing Bela Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 2007, the pianist, who speaks Hungarian, noticed how Lu phrased a tricky segment of the piece in a way that made it seem as if he were drawing on the cadences of Hungarian.

“Lu is a very careful music reader, analytical as well as emotional in his quiet communication with a composer,” Chiao said.

He is also a master at bringing musicians together as an ensemble, paying great attention to the exchanges among musical instruments in the articulation of every phrase, the critic said. “He is inspirational for musicians, capable of igniting them to make music rather than just doing a job.”

During the first season under Lu, the NSO is featuring an eclectic repertoire, highlighting Bohemian-Austrian composer Gustav Mahler and fin-de-siecle Vienna. Arnold Schonberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg are being played side by side with Haydn and Mozart.

In the coming season, Mahler still takes center stage, while the music of Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen will give local audiences an unusual listening experience.

Lu has no qualms about 20th-century music scaring off the audience. “A bit of explanation of its origin, but not too much, will help get listeners into that world,” he said. “Then let them discover for themselves that musical truth is there, just as it is in Mozart and Beethoven.”

As a composer, he is committed to the pursuit of musical truths, Lu said. “I have never been concerned with becoming rich or famous through music; I just concentrate on the essence of music.”

Lu adores Mahler, whom he believes presents great challenges and opportunities for any ambitious conductor who wants to realize his capacity to the fullest.

Yet even dearer to him are the words of the great composer, vexed by the question of life and death as well as his self-identification as Austrian, Bohemian, German and Jew—while not really belonging to any of these societies.

“He once said he had many questions in mind that he found no answers to, but in composing or conducting, he seemed to have found the answers, or the questions become nonexistent,” Lu said.

“Just pursue musical truths and accept all the challenges this implies,” Lu said, as if to himself. “I am blessed to have the chance to engage with things spiritual, so my hope is to do my best in this limited life to deliver something eternal, to have people experience a moment’s gracing eternity in music.

This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today July 1, 2011.